That’s right, only 21 more shopping days until Christmas… oh yeah, and here’s the Social Media Roundup!

Being a bully online can hurt your SEO

Google, this week, did something almost unheard of… it changed it’s search algorithm because of one person. Last week the New York Times ran an article talking about the online eyeglasses company, DecorMyEyes. The basics of the story are that the company intentionally gives customers horrible service and borderline stalks individuals. The whole goal of this process is to get customers to head online and write bad reviews or complaint posts talking about and linking back to the company website. In SEO this, of course, provides constant fresh content to the web with links back to the site which in turn aids the search rank performance of DecorMyEyes website. Well, when Google caught wind of this, they decided to change their ranking algorithm to help prevent a similar situation from happening again.

I’m wanted for what?!?

A Florida college student recently had quite a shock when he Googled his own name. A victim of a spelling error by authorities, Zachary Garcia found a news story online saying that he was wanted by the police for murder. As it turns out, the real suspect was Zachery Garcia with an “e” and not Zachary Garcia with an “a”. In light of the oversight, authorities distributed materials looking for the college student and even sent out photos from his drivers license. When asked how he felt about the mix up, Zachary was quoted as saying, “I work at Publix and I might get somebody’s sub (order) wrong. But for somebody to get (the photo of a suspect) wrong… it’s not a sandwich, it’s somebody’s life you’re playing with.” Moral of the story, Google yourself. You never know what you might find.

Your Klout might not be all it’s cracked up to be

Adriaan Pelzer, the “Creative Technical Dude” over at RAAK, decided to ask himself the question of if one could achieve a high Klout score simply by tweeting a lot on Twitter. To test, Adriaan setup four Twitter bots that tweeted mildly humorous quotes at either one, five, fifteen or thirty minute intervals. His test results over 80-days showed two things. The more you tweet, the more followers you get. In a weird overlap, even the bot that tweeted every single minute, each account gained followers on a stead and linear scale… granted a lot of the followers were bots themselves (birds of a feather?). The second result and conclusion was that Klout is broken. The one minute interval bot had a Klout score of 50 on day 80 and then 51 on day 81. The other three bots had fairly low/minimal scores around 30, but for the five minute interval bot, the true reach score changed by over 31 between day 80 and day 81. Adriaan’s conclusion was that Klout needed to up their game on filtering for bots and even providing more regular results. This is a conclusion I have had myself from my own testing with the system. On a positive note though, the CEO of Klout, Joe Fernandez, took some time to comment on the post and said that Klout was working on making results and monitoring better.

So much for tweeting from the other side

Oklahoma has passed an interesting law that allows executors or administrators of estates in Oklahoma the ability to access, manage, or delete social profiles of deceased users. According to Erik Sass of the blog “The Social Graf“, the legislation’s sponsor former State Representative Ryan Kiesel stated: “The number of people who use Facebook today is almost equal to the population of the United States. When a person dies, someone needs to have legal access to their accounts to wrap up any unfinished business, close out the account if necessary or carry out specific instructions the deceased left in their will.” Kiesel added: “Digital photo albums and e-mails are increasingly replacing their physical counterparts, and I encourage Oklahomans to think carefully about what they want to happen to these items when they pass away.” So the question then is what would you want done with your social media accounts after you pass on to the other side? I think a Twitter bot with mildly humorous quotes would be in order (wonder what my Klout score would be then?).

“Please stop using social media, Mom”

Social media addiction is an area that is just starting to receive study and attention as more and more people are online using sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. I know that I could probably be diagnosed with an issues as I start to twitch kinda funny if I’m away from my Facebook and Twitter feeds for too long. In a very humorous first strike, YourTango created a spoof “After School Special” to help people see the dangers of social media addiction.